The Genius

ெ
The Genius, by Margaret Horton Potter

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Genius, by Margaret Horton Potter
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Genius
Author: Margaret Horton Potter

Release Date: July 5, 2007 [eBook #22004]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GENIUS***
E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

THE GENIUS
by
MARGARET POTTER
Author of "The House of De Mailly" "Istar of Babylon" Etc. Etc.

London and New York Harper & Brothers Publishers 1906 Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. Published March, 1906.

TO MY BROTHER EDWARD CLEMENT POTTER

CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
Prologue 3 I. The Czar's Ball 8 II. Michael 26 III. The Gregoriev Heir 42 IV. The Corps of Cadets 60 V. Death Joy 75 VI. Nathalie 90 VII. Spring and the Rose 105 VIII. In Camp 126 IX. "Half-gods Go" 156 X. Self-Destiny 184 XI. The Moscow Conservatoire 202 XII. The Gods Arrive 226 XIII. Student's Folly 255 XIV. The Third Section 272 XV. Engulfment 285 XVI. Joseph 302 XVII. Heritage 319 VIII. Joseph the Sower 337 XIX. His Harvest 353 XX. Madame Féodoreff 364 XXI. Tosca Regnant 381 XXII. The Lion 400 XXIII. The Hermit 427 Epilogue 446

THE GENIUS
THEMA
Hark, ye Great, that withdraw yourselves from the Multitude! Loneliness is written for your word. Alone shall ye strive to solve the riddle of Creation.
Seek ye help of them that have gone before? Ye shall find it not. Dream ye of sympathy, of praise, from those that watch your work to-day? They shall give ye rather mockery. Finally, would ye leave to your children legacies of wisdom that shall be as gold unto them? Lo! Such desire, also, must be vain.
Dowered of Vision, Power or Wantonness, ye shall not escape this scourge of Fate. Alone shall ye cut your way through the rock of Destiny up to the High Place of Restitution. Yea! Solitary shall your labor be. But out of solitude cometh, in good time, that Understanding of the Law that all, at last, must seek--and find.

THE GENIUS
PROLOGUE
THE ANNUNCIATION
In the Western world of the revised calendar it was the evening of January twelfth. In Russia it was New Year's night, of the year 1840. The year was twenty-three hours old; for the bells of the three churches in Klin had just chimed eleven times. But in "Maidonovo," a country-place of the Gregorievs just outside the town, the mistress of the house, Princess Sophia, had not yet gone to bed. She had been alone in her bedroom for some time, and was now on her knees before a little shrine presided over by a great, golden ikon, with its flaring colors, and stiff, Byzantine figures of Mary and the infant Christ. There, before the World-Mother, knelt the loneliest of unhappy women: daughter of an old, impoverished Muscovite house, and wife, by necessity, of Michael Gregoriev, a man of millions, chief of the Third Section in Moscow: an official after the heart of the Iron Czar, and of Satan, his master, too.
For nearly an hour the Princess had knelt on a heavily rugged floor, her eyes lifted to the face of the Virgin, her lips revealing, in those whispers that had become part of her life, the ever-living anguish of her heart. She was in her thirty-third year, poor creature: had known now sixteen years of married life--sixteen years of revelation, of repulsion mental and physical, of misery not to be told. One by one her little illusions, fancies, hopes, and, with them, all the graces of her youth, had fallen from her, till there remained but a shadowy, faded creature, holding, in the depths of her bruised soul, just one more desire, one final hope, of which the very possibility was by this time all but extinguished.
Yet it was of this hope she was speaking to-night to that distant, shadowy Mary, who, her confessor had told her, can always understand and always pity. Here, in the chill silence of her lonely rooms, while the wide world without grew stiller and more still under its pale covering, the wife had gathered her last resolution together, and dared a demand of those High Immortals whose contact with humanity had ended so long ago. They had hitherto been pitiless enough with her; though this she would scarcely acknowledge even in her feeble rebellion. But she should ask them, at last, to make her a tardy restitution.
Sophia was unaware that her wish was a selfish one. It seemed so natural a thing she asked; and her mind, poor lady, was all upon herself, there being no other soul to think for her. That